iPhoto ‘09: Force iPhoto to rebuild all Faces data
January 29, 2009 at 4:24 pm Mac, Tips Add commentsSome people have been noting that the initial scan of their iPhoto library for faces has either failed, or has not identified any possible faces. It seems that Apple has not given a way for users to easily rebuild the faces data. However, if you want to force iPhoto to rescan your library to identify faces you can do the following:
DISCLAIMER: This is only for users comfortable with navigating into their iPhoto Library. Make sure you have a backup of your iPhoto Library before doing anything. This is not official documentation from Apple.
This procedure will erase any Faces tagging that you have done.
- Close iPhoto
- Go into your iPhoto Library in the Finder by selecting iPhoto Library, right click and choose Show Package Contents
- Delete the file face_blob.db
- Delete the file face.db
- Restart iPhoto
iPhoto should now start the initial Faces scan again, and it will rebuild anything thumbnails it may have previously created.
Here’s hoping someone finds a hidden terminal preference command to do this, or that Apple adds this ability into the UI.
July 19th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Thanks for the advice, in my case I had tagged too many images to reset the database. I did find a way to recreate the images, though it is time consuming. When I browser the library in Faces some of the thumbnails were there, others were missing. I selected the missing ones, right-clicked and selected “Detect Missing Faces” and it recreated the thumbnails.
November 8th, 2009 at 11:11 am
You do not have to delete your faces database. You can just select all your photos, right click and select “Detect Missing Faces”